A MAGAZINE writer, Mark Seal, wrote a piece about the Easter 2015 robbery at London’s Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company. Joe Penhall adapted the article into a screenplay. James Marsh directed this, the third film to bring the robbery and its people to the screen.

Is it any good? As a showcase for a bunch of Britain’s most watchable character actors, yes. As a description of the crime, not bad. As a study of criminal morality, quite good. As a reward for spending 108 minutes in a darkened cavern? That’s for you to decide.

Some might look on ”King Of Thieves” as a swan song for Maurice Micklewhite, a.k.a. Sir Michael Caine, born 1933, with a career in 130 movies over 70 years. He plays old lag Brian Reader, mourning the death of his much-loved wife, bored, lonely, persuaded by Basil (Charlie Cox), a young tearaway with technical skills, a key to the premises and a low standard of morality, to do one last job with the prospect of a really big payout.

Brian recruits a crew of other old lags, played by Jim Broadbent, Michael Gambon, Ray Winstone, Tom Courtenay and Paul Whitehouse. They spend the first half of the film planning and executing the robbery. It’s done with flair, élan and a few laughs liberally sprinkled with the word that I’m forbidden to use in print.

The film’s second half is darker, more introspective, as alliances form among the team in a case of every man for himself in sharing the loot. That’s the film’s more substantial purpose. The jails are full of crims who’ve ratted on their mates and been ratted on. The notion of honour among thieves gets a nicely-deflating exposition, enhanced by the arrival, rather toward the film’s end, of the folk from Scotland Yard who haven’t been resting on their laurels waiting for somebody to grass.

In summary, agreeable cinema of the kind the Brits do with agreeably restrained flair.

At all cinemas

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